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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9439509" data-attributes="member: 55680">For me at least 5e plays like a cleaned up version of 3.5e. Which is good enough for a lot of things...Yeah and a lot of people are getting grumpy at 5.5e for not adding enough crunch. I think it's pretty safe to say that if 5.5e added as much crunch as some people wanted it would be harder to GM/play. There seem to be relatively few voices online calling for it to become more streamlined and newbie friendly due to potential future newbie players (obviously) not playing much of a role in online discussions of D&D despite making the game fun for them being an absolutely essential part of design. This makes me think that in the history of D&D when they actually find something that appeals to newbies it's usually by blundering into it blindly, the how massive runaway success of various versions of Basic D&D seem to have caught TSR by surprise in the 80's...Bwuh? I just don't see that...I can some a good bit of 2e spirit in 5e, but not all that much of its specific rules. 5e seems to be a messy compromise in which it takes a lot of what 4e was like under the hood and twists it to be more 3.5e in its details with some 2e philosophy even though not the specific rules. Seemed like a mess at first but worked decently as a compromise for a whole slew of people and it was nice to see it bring the hobby together and bring so many new people in. Don't see the hobby staying that united in the coming years.Yup, there's a big old spectrum and for my personal preferences 5e is waaaaay too close to 4e to be my ideal game, but 5e is a good enough compromise I can roll with it just fine. 5.5e is a less good compromise and I think's crossed a line for me and will keep on going in that direction in the future. I don't really have any interest in DMing it (unless I was obliged to due to running a club or something) but I'd play it if a good friend was really pumped to run a 5.5e campaign.I think the pacing issue as a reason for 5e being hard to GM carries a lot of weight. It's something I struggled with personally when I first started running 5e and it's something I've personally seen newer 5e DMs struggle with in a way that makes the game less fun.Simply put 5e is built around the assumption that there will be more encounters per long rest than most groups can reasonably get done in a session. So what happens is generally either:A. The party does fewer fights per long rest than the game's assumptions call for, which does bad things to class balance, refocuses the whole game on nova tactics and constant long drawn out brutal fights (to counter the nova tactics), and worsens a lot of the flaws of 5e that already exist. From the comments I've seen from 5e newbs this happens a lot and causes a lot of problems.B. The party has more than one session per long rest. With a party of adults with constantly changing schedules this is a pain in the ass as you have to track partially-spent resources across sessions and have naughty word like the party getting attritioned down in the middle of the dungeon and then BAM! a fully rested cleric pops up among them since Bob couldn't make last session  but could make this one and you can't tell him to wait until the party's out of the dungeon before rejoining the game since Bob is your friend and he's bringing pizza.These problems can be overcome with good DMing, but I found them to be a big pain in the ass personally.This same problem was even worse in 3.5e (the infamous ten minute adventuring day) but not really an issue in TSR-D&D (due to combat being so fast and PCs having fewer resources) or 4e (since 4e works fine if you have just 1-2 big fights per long rest). I think that the playstyle of a lot of 5e newbies would really be muuuuuuuch better served by 4e than by 5e.My workaround for all of this was "put the PCs on a boat" (or space ship) and only allow the PCs to get a long rest in port (not on a random desert island). They had to go on long sea journeys between each long rest so I got to really grind them down Oregon Trail-style which was fun. It also explained why Bob's PC wasn't around last session but is here now (he was busy doing naughty word below decks on the boat). And why Jim's character suddenly isn't around during Jim's vacation (he got sick and is in the infirmary below decks, we have to get him to port for treatment!). But I've played in whole campaigns that constantly ran into these kinds of issues such as waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too few fights per long rest or people coming back to the table after a few week break due to real life and then scratching their heads and trying to remember if they had used Channel Divinity or not last session since the DM wasn't enforcing any centralized method of resource tracking from session to session.Damn, I've seen it be used more than Magic Missile in a lot of campaigns. People's experiences can be very different....</blockquote>

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